Once an enterprise application is written, changes to the logic tend to be minor, few, and far-between. Indeed, in enterprise software, transactional integrity and the accuracy of business logic are of paramount importance, however the manner of interacting with an enterprise application changes frequently due to reasons such as a new hardware or modes of interaction become available (e.g., a touch screen), and/or a new device becomes available (e.g., a smart phone), and/or usage models or scenarios emerge that were not contemplated when the original user interface (UI) was developed. As such, over time, the originally-developed user interface might become ‘stale’ and might not fairly represent emerging use cases, and/or might not take full advantage of newly-emerged modes or devices. Accordingly, quite often, enterprise software user interfaces begin to lag far behind the state of the art and, in particular, certain ‘form-based’ styles of user interfaces become outdated when new hardware or modes of interaction become available.
Indeed, tablets, hand-held mobile devices, and even wearable wristwatches are also becoming ubiquitous. These types of devices present new mediums in which the form factor, the amount of screen real-estate, the method of interaction (voice and touch vs. mouse and keyboard), and perhaps often the fundamental goals of interaction, vary significantly from those of the original desktop application.
What is needed is a way to be able to adapt an application's user interface to present new design styles and/or different display methods—yet present the same data as is needed by the users of the application. Techniques are needed to address the problem of rapid development of a mobile device interface from a pre-existing user interface. More specifically, what is needed is a technique or techniques for rapidly (e.g., automatically) recasting a form-based user interface into a modern user interface.
None of the aforementioned legacy approaches achieve the capabilities of the herein-disclosed techniques for automatically recasting a form-based user interface into a mobile device user interface using common data. Therefore, there is a need for improvements.